


The Art Of Pareidolia

by livinglikeafleetingdream



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artist Reader, I'm Bad At Tagging, Other, and summaries, hes a tulpa or something idk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 14:21:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16834351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livinglikeafleetingdream/pseuds/livinglikeafleetingdream
Summary: You know those games people play with themselves where they try to see faces in abstract shapes? This time, it might not be a game...





	The Art Of Pareidolia

You saw him everywhere now. 

At first, you thought it was simply a trick of the light or the brain. Something that was a consequence of human instinct.

His face, embedded in the fool’s gold flecks of your fake granite table. Four eyes, horns arcing backward, sharply pointed ears and sharply pointed teeth. You grabbed a sketchbook and roughed out the shape before you lost it again in the sea of abstract lines and dots, but ended up losing him anyway before refining the piece.

You met him again, walking to the local store, a small business whose family owned both the grocery store and the gas station. In the trees this time, same face, tall and wearing furs. You took a picture, sometimes your brain holds onto these things, but his likeness had faded again by the time you got home. You added what you could remember. 

By week two you thought you were going insane. Or maybe you were so touch starved you were starting to hallucinate, you’ve heard of it happening to people lost in the mountains and this town was equally boring and isolated. 

You saw him in almost every pattern you came across, gravel with a tail, a swarm of ants outlining a crouching form, the fricking Aurora Borealis and some stars looked like a head with hair.

The drawing was long finished, and honestly, he was attractive but you had no idea what was happening. He sat on the corner of your desk, untouched but not forgotten or discarded.

It was the fourth week that you got an answer, the summer was nigh unbearable and the grass and sky shimmered outside. You saw it move in a way heat shimmers do not, part of it stood and stretched, walked over to you on digitigrade legs and sat down. You should have been freaking out but you sensed a calmness (His soul?) so you did nothing.

“Thank you for the drawing. It helped a lot, I’ve been in bad shape.”

You figured it out quickly. What you needed to do to finish what you began by sketching that face a month ago. You went back and grabbed your inking pens.

Creatures like this, you’ve read, they live off belief. People create or discover them, and they get to feed. Not really on the people themselves, but the interaction. Social energy, spirituality, it’s energy like any other. And energy is never created or destroyed. It has to be transferred.

The drawing was lined and colored over the next few days, most was grey or gold tones over white, and there was some red, orange, and brown added in to pull the clothing together. He has shining, opalescent eyes, and a sword at his side done in the same ever-shimmering ink.

You were more energized then you’d been in months the day you finished, the way you feel at the start of a good morning, where you can feel the fortune in the air. Leaving the drawing where it lay, you went to work.

You got home to a mostly quiet house, a bit let down at first. But as you listened, you heard movement in your art room. Sharp clicking, like dog nails on tile and also like someone picking up and setting down glass paint jars. You pushed open the door.

There he was, holding on to your drawing of him and looking curiously at everything in the room. Turning to you, he broke into a grin before kneeling swiftly at your feet.

“I must thank you again, I never expected you to go this far. Especially not if you knew what you were doing. Could I get the name of the person who helped me manifest?”

This was going to be interesting.


End file.
